TIMELINE:
11 MAY - 17 MAY 2026
RESEARCH METHODS:
BRAINSTORMING, INTERVIEWS
TEAM:
VIBHOOTI • DIYA • CLARA • MARY • OINDRILLA • REVATI • VERONIKA • WALEED • YIFEI
Vitae Curricula:
Week 3
Brief
"Design an experiential CV."
Overview of Week
For this week, we wanted to ground our project through interviews with applicants and recruiters. Besides that, we focused a lot on our mid-point presentation.
Brainstorming hacking
Since Being a CV worked really well last week, we quickly brainstormed other forms a CV might take. However, we parked these as we wanted to ground our project through qualitative research.
List of ideas to explore along with what's missing in our process currently. We identified a workshop session and interviews as our next steps.
Listed locations we can test our ideas. (Image is larger on click)
Comic books or zines can be a meeting point for CVs and portfolios for creatives. (Image is larger on click)
Since Clara, Waleed and I know music, we wanted to use music as an alternative form of CVs (instead of text on paper) and busk our CV after the mid-point presentation. (Image is larger on click)
As we wanted to have piano, ukulele and singing, we chose King's Cross Station. We wouldn't necessarily put music on our CVs but it is an important part of our lives. (Sketch: Clara)
Interviews
Questions
We prepared a separate set of questions for recruiters and applicants.
Recruiter questions were around tools, stages they interact, and how they assess.
Applicant questions were about frustrations and how they feel about the system.
Sample and Location
We were able to interview 9 students from London College of Communication and London South Bank University on Tuesday, 12th May 2026 from 12:35pm. This was done in pairs (Veronika, Revati | Yifei, Author) with one person conducting the interview and the other person making notes. (Images: Yifei, Veronika, Revati)
We were able to interview 2 recruiters remotely. Since we felt that the responses from applicants were more emotionally rich and convenient to conduct in our timeframe, we allocated more time towards it. (Credits: Oindrilla, Author)
Analysis
Yifei and Veronika developed insights from the interviews. The responses further strengthened our intuition to conduct a workshop to dive deeper.
Preparing for busking
We used a recognisable melody (Sweet Caroline) that worked well with ukulele and guitar and was not too technical for singing. Clara and I worked on rewriting the lyrics and adding professional context.
Since Waleed and I had worked with Bold Theatre previously and had a good rapport with the staff, were were able to use one of their spaces to rehearse. We were able to strike a nice balance between piano and ukulele and leave enough room for Clara's voice. (Video controls are available)
Presentation
We summarised our insights and also recapped what did until now as context for the mid-point review.
Presentation from Thursday. (Video controls are available)
Feedback:
Really good job of framing the question in the beginning.
Enjoyed the balance between hacking the system and working with it.
It might be worth interviewing smaller businesses as they have different hiring processes.
Look into personality tests.
Other inquiry and steps
Workshop
Oindrilla developed a plan for the workshop which we decided to develop further next week.
Inquiry and materials for the workshop. (Image is larger on click)
High level flow and timings for the workshop. (Image is larger on click)
Busking
Right after the presentation on Thursday, we headed to Kings Cross Station. Unfortunately, we had to end rather early as a bad actor took Clara's CV and made inappropriate remarks.
Clara busking her CV with Waleed and I playing the accompaniment. The instruments sound louder than real-life in the video. (Video controls are available, credits: Yifei)
Another format for singing the CV quickly tested through improvising and singing it word for word. (Video controls are available, credits: Mary)
Reflection
Stepping outside the system produced evidence about it that working within it could not have revealed, we recognised the limitations of these guerilla mediums (Perry et al., 2005), especially as they required a high level of extraversion. Furthermore, not everyone can do this safely, and the approach is socially uneven (Yee et al., 2024).
Since we wanted to use a piano and stick to places where playing and singing is legal, we were limited to public locations. In retrospect, we had not anticipated the encounter at all and our risk assessment was not thorough enough. For future work, we decided to stick to corporate areas and remove personal details from our CVs.
References
Perry, D. et al. (2005) Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters. [Publisher and location needed.]
Yee, J.S.R., Tan, L. and Jefferies, E. (2024) 'Invisible Designing: Emotional and Affective Labour in Relational Participatory Practices', in Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
